The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

a military threat: China is peaceful and defensiveminded.
Chinese soldiers stress that the double-digit
annual growth in the defense budget does not mean
that China is girding for war or territorial conquest. The
PLA’s growing capabilities are regularly documented
in annual U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) reports
on Chinese military power, constantly analyzed by
researchers and analysts in open source publications
such as this conference series, as well as scrutinized
by the media. The absence in recent years of military
provocations in the Taiwan Strait can help but continued
inflammatory rhetoric by senior soldiers and
on-going incidents between Chinese forces and those
of other countries—notably the United States and Japan—directly
contradict the image of a peaceable and
non-threatening rising power that Beijing desires to
promote.
CONCLUSION
Different entities and echelons within the PLA
are faced with reconciling contradictions, confronting
challenges, and maneuvering around doctrine as they
grapple with the 2003 MSG and subsequent modifications.
The New Historic Missions pose daunting
dilemmas for China’s ground forces. But one of the
greatest challenges across the PLA will be to maintain
focus, something many soldiers seem to recognize.
Other challenges to be confronted are managing the
competing interests of different services as well as the
tensions between echelons. Top level politico-military
leaders appear aware of these and are engaged in trying
to mitigate these frustrations. The PLA will also
need to reconcile a number of contradictions. The most
fundamental contradiction is the one between the de-
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